I'm not sure what you mean
The db scale is logarithmic but doesn't match how our eyes sense light. So small changes in db may result in large visible light changes, or vise versa. Have you ever looked at a raw image, it doesn't look correct untill a gamma is applied, even though roughly the same information exists in both raw and gamma images. This is a similar concept.
To do do this: db > linear > gamma
This can be precomputed into a lookup table with the number of entries being the number of current steps, 8-bit 256 entries.
"Grok" was a term used in my undergrad CS courses in the early 2010s. It's been a pretty common word in computing for a while now, though the current generation of young programmers and computer scientists seem not to know it as readily, so it may be falling out of fashion in those spaces.